As far as I know, the punctuation-inside-quotation style arose from typesetting convention. If you set type the old-fashioned way, it looks really strange to put punctuation on the outside... and for some reason people like hard and fast rules, like 'Put all types of punctuation inside' rather than 'Put some types of punctuation inside'. Fairly obviously, I'm not a follower of this particular convention. :)

Quotes are sub-optimal structures anyway. We should start indicating quotations with text coloration instead of punctuation marks. Then we'd all have an excuse to carry around a full set of colored pencils all the time.